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An anonymous reader writes "Never seen video footage of the introduction of the Macintosh in January 1984 was published for the first time on the Internet today. Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years, and German media agency TextLab has unearthed this only surviving video tape of the launch." They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie.

Saying "They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie." as you post it to Slashdot's frontpage mid-day is like walking up to a guy after a fight, knifing him in the stomach and saying "You could probably use more bandages for your wounds."

Nah, it's funnier when you only half-translate it, and poorly at that! I was in a Betriebsrat (worker's council) meeting one day at my former employer in Raunheim, Hesse, and the worker's council head (who spoke German only) used the word "ge-updated" in reference to a system we were rolling out... for some reason that Denglish word has just stuck with me ever since.

It's easy. Take the sentence, "This website no longer operates due to excessive traffic caused by being linked to from Slashdot." Translate it into German. Remove the spaces. You now have a valid German word.

> Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more> robust format.

This is a common misconception, but no. The magnetic tape used is almost identical and will last roughly as long. VHS and Beta, using magnetic tape and analog formats, are very long-lasting and decay gracefully.

You might see extra noise and dropouts on a 25-year-old VHS or Beta, but it will play perfectly fine as long as it wasn't stored in a hot or wet place. Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media.;-)

Even in the 80's, Macintosh was (generally) only significantly more expensive than the cheap brands. If you compared it to the better built and more expensive brands fitted with comparable video and sound, there wasn't much difference (in most cases).

The 5 year typical service life of a mac compared to 3 years for dos/windows typically made it less expensive than even the cheap brands over the long term.

And once you factored in support costs in a business, the mac made up for the purchase price differenc

Betamax is the consumer format, Betacam is the pro format. Betacam SP was a tape enhancement on normal Betacam. Same size, better materials, higher bandwidth, more scanlines. Both are much larger than Betamax tape, and much higher res. Betamax died, Betacam has always been a success, and continues success now as Betacam Digital, though it's losing out to the various DV derivitives in many cases.

Now we know that slashdot is frequented by hordes and hordes of closet mac lovers. That will be some coming out when all the Linux geeks here finally come out of the closet and get a nice, shiny, cuddly mac mini:) I think they will succeed in/.-ing Apple's web site - which would be a first in Internet history methinks.
Something else - is there something similar available for the iMac's first introduction, or for the NeXT cube? I would like to have those.

About 15 years ago, I had a job as a PC repair monkey at the computer center at my university. As was often the case with student jobs, people came and went all the time. We were hiring new kids every couple of weeks.

About halfway through my senior year, we hired this freshman. Nice kid, but a little on the clueless side. Not only had he never worked on a Mac before, he'd never even seen one in person.

One day he had to go to one of the computer labs to pick up a Mac and bring it into the shop for service. (The analog board needed replacing, or something like that.) He hauled it in, set it on the bench, and proceeded to dig through all the bins in the shop.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

"A Mac power cord," he said. I just kinda stared for a minute. "What?" he demanded.

Without saying anything, I reached down into the bin by my bench, grabbed a power cord, and threw it at him.

Although wouldn't it be a antastic revolution if we could download from people who had already dowloaded it, thus allowing us all to share bandwidth. The data would arrive at such a high speed that one might consider it a torrent. A bittorrent, one might say. If only such a technology existed...

(Sometimes I wish others who downloaded a huge video or slashdotted site would bother to describe some of it so I will for the rest of y'all)

Steve Jobs ca. 1984 is speaking on a stage in front of an audience, suit coat and bow tie, these are his pre-jeans-and-black-turtleneck days. He tells the audience "All of the images you about to see on the large screen will be generated by what's in that bag." The lifts the black bag to reveal a Mac on a table (applause) he inserts a diskette into the Mac and steps back. The word MACINTOSH slowly scrolls across the screen to the tune of "Chariots of Fire" (wild appluase) Screen shots of paint program, word processor and calculator, fonts, program editor, 3d chess (cheering, applause). Steve introduces Macintosh speaking for itself. A bad robotic voice reads a few paragraphs of text on the screen. (applause, cheering) (wide shot of audience appluading) (end)

I do recall the days when PC DOS and the Apple II ruled the world and first time I saw a Mac in action was easy to recognize it was a big step forward.

oohhhh... Rounded Rectangles! Wild Applause.And it took till the Ibook G4 before I bought another Apple (my first was a IIc).Seriously, the mac is back. OsX and Ilife, are as awe inspiring today as MacOS and MacWrite/MacPaint were back then...

When the Mac introduction happened in 1984, there was a lengthy, somewhat heated thread on the "SLASHDOT-L" BITNET Listserv. I foolishly didn't save a copy of it, but I'm sure someone out there has it and will post it in the next few days. From my recollections, people were of divided opinions.

A small minority thought it was "insanely great," and I suppose they still do. Most readers, though, found flaws with it.

Some viewed the Macintosh as "just a toy," and insisted that they were holding out for a real computer - the Lisa.

Some thought it had promise, but wouldn't be truly useful until Apple added support for the Commodore-based SIDplayer music format.

Quite a lot said it was too expensive. Some of these pointed out that there were any number of kit computers they could build for less, while others questioned having a screen built in - and a small one at that - when most people already had televisions.

Purists were quick to point out that the Mac lacked features that had been developed years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and others. Why wasn't the keyboard more of a chording model? And why did the mouse have only one button? Even Engelbart's original patent drawings, they argued, had shown a multi-button mouse. What good was a single button?

And of course, there were the hardcore geeks and techies, who were quick to point out that it wasn't any good if it couldn't run a real operating system, like VAX/VMS.

Ah, the good old days. If anyone has a copy of the thread, please post it!

All the free tts systems sound the same as they did since the early 80s. Because they all use the same algorithms and data generated by the Navy. The nicer sounding ones that have more complete data sets, improved algorithms and are computationally more intensive are only available through special licensing. (the algorithms have multiple patents, the data has copyrights, etc).

Compare a public domain TTS like rsynth [cmu.edu] to a free, but commercial quality TTS like festival [ed.ac.uk] or Bell Lab's [bell-labs.com]. It's funny how rsynth sounds a lot like the mac (although rsynth doesn't have a bunch of predefined settings to do different voices, you have to set all the parameters yourself to make it sound exactly like Bruce).

TTS technology doesn't move terribly fast. the TTS that was in the Mac 21 years ago is basically the same technology 30 years ago. But that's no excuse for Apple not to have moved on to using diphonemes or triphonemes like other systems. Apple is behind, but in the TTS world, 20 years behind is not all that far behind. (unlike say the harddrive world, where 20 years behind is the difference between 100s of gigabytes to 10s of megabytes. ouch)

If you are interested by this video, check out Andy Hertzfeld's accounts of that presentation [folklore.org]. (Andy was one of the developer of the Mac back then.) While you're they're, check out the rest of the Classic Macintosh section of that site. It's a lot of stories (mostly by Andy) of how the Mac came to be.

(I'm not associated with folklore.org or Andy Hertzfeld or anything. I found the site a couple weeks ago while googling for little rubber feet [google.com], and got hooked.)

Most of this footage has been available for years within Robert Cringely's excellent documentary, Triumph of the Nerds [pbs.org].
No self-respecting geek or Apple fan should be without it! Three tapes' worth of interviews with industry pioneers, from Homebrew Computer Club to Microsoft. Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison are fascinating, but Steve Jobs steals the show:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product ehm and you say why is that important - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and ehm so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success. For the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.
- Steve Jobs

The Mac was the first major computer with support for the 3 1/2 inch hard cased floppies. PCs continued to use the 5 1/4 inch soft floppies for years afterwards. I remember reading a magazine article where Jobs pulled a floppy out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Everyone gasped. They had learned how fragile floppy drives were and the importance of always carrying them careully and putting them promptly into the box (not only did the 5 1/4s bend, they had holes so dust could get onto the disk surfaces).

That's why everyone claps right at the beginning, he pulls the floppy out of his pocket(!) and sticks it into the computer.

People watching today might not realize that the Mac did not have a hard drive. One was later provided as an expensive extra option. But initially the Mac had only a floppy drive to boot from.

Those were the days... I loved the Mac. I bought one back in 1984, the first GUI I'd ever used. Then a year later I laboriously unsoldered the memory chips and upgraded the system from 128K to a whole half a meg of memory. I can't count how many Macs I've bought over the years since then... we've got 7 right now, counting the 2 my kids in college have.

I don't see what's amazing about Macintosh classic when 1 year later Amiga came with colorful graphics(up to 4096 colors), a real preemptive multitask OS and all the hot stuff.
You could actualy format a disk drive while printing and doing some other stuff while on Mac you had to wait in front of a black & white screen.

The Amiga's fate was probably sealed when Commodore bought out Amiga. The Mac had the charismatic Jobs and his trademark Reality Distortion Field, with serious attempts at making a business computer. And the Amiga had Commodore, who just kind of threw it out there, expected people to play games on it and otherwise treated it as a shiny toy.

Another difference is that while Amiga focused on flashy hardware, Apple focused on a solid user interface. It's a lot easier to be backwards compatible with software

1. Where is Amiga OS now? Literally? It's changed hands so many times, it's becoming a bit of a joke.

2. Who is actually developing software for Amiga OS? It seems that there must be some developer making something for it.

My point is, just because it's still being developed doesn't mean that it outlasted MacOS. I think more people are running the GNU HURD than Amiga OS.
I remember the first time I saw an Amiga computer--I thought

No, not corny at all. Remember that this was 1984. This was back when the C64 was considered state of the art. The PC programs were text only. Most people in the audience had never seen anything like that before.

I find it rather unsurprising that they wouldn't make a huge fuss about the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Why, you ask?

The "old Apple" used to love to look backwards and do things like celebrate anniversaries (20th Anniversary Mac, many "special edition" products like the clear Newton 110, etc.). Unfortunately, I think looking at the past 20 years of the Mac, while there have been some great milestones, there have also been a lot of missed opportunities. I think the current management at Apple understands this better and is more focused on the next 20 years of the Mac.

It's kind of ironic that Steve Jobs has much better business sense than the "business" people they put in charge of Apple originally because they didn't think Steve Jobs could really run Apple. Man, has he proven those folks wrong!

This movie was encoded using Sorenson Video and QDesign Music. They are both poorish choices for downloadable video nowadays, with MPEG-4 being preferred. The codecs used date back to the tail end of the era when QuickTime was mostly used for CD kiosks and presentations, and just when QT was starting to develop towards Internet streaming applications.